JOHN HOWARD has defended his decision not to apologise to
indigenous Australians during his 11 years in power and rejected
suggestions that his views on this issue and the Kyoto Protocol
cost his party the election last year.

Despite his Liberal Party colleagues endorsing the official
apology last month, a defiant Mr Howard gave a take-no-prisoners
assessment of it during a question-and-answer session with students
at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard yesterday.

"I do not believe, as a matter of principle, that one generation
can accept responsibility for the acts of an earlier generation. I
don't accept that as a matter of principle," the former prime
minister said.

"In some cases, children were wrongly removed; in other cases,
they were removed for good reason; in other cases, they were given
up; and in other cases, the judgment on the removal is obscure or
difficult to make."

Mr Howard warned that an apology also ran the risk of people
thinking they had now "ticked the box" on action to redress the
problems of indigenous Australia, which included an unacceptably
high mortality rate compared to non-indigenous Australians.

It was the second address Mr Howard has made in the US in a week
in which he defended his legacy and, in the process, embarrassed
the Opposition Leader, Brendan Nelson. Dr Nelson has dropped many
of Mr Howard's policies, including on the apology, Work Choices,
climate change and withdrawing troops from Iraq.

On the apology, Mr Howard said his view was shared by Noel
Pearson, a man he regarded as "the voice of contemporary indigenous
Australia more than anybody else".

He also turned to what he said was the "broader issue": 20 or 30
years of failed policies in relation to indigenous affairs.

"I think we persevered for too long with the notion of separate
development. I think the only way the indigenous people of
Australia can get what we call a fair go is for them to become part
of the mainstream of the community and get the benefits and
opportunities available from mainstream Australian society, whilst
recognising the particular and special place of the
indigenous culture in the life of the country."

Mr Howard also rejected suggestions from a questioner that this
issue and his refusal to sign the Kyoto Protocol had cost the
Coalition the election. "The first lesson I learned is, you win
some, you lose some," he said. "I did have the opportunity of
winning four elections. I am not going to give an instant
retrospective."

He said his position on Kyoto was a "very simple one" - that
Australia would have been disadvantaged by the possibility of two
countries not assuming "the same obligations as we might have
assumed". This would have imposed penalties on emerging Australian
industries that did not apply in other countries. This was
sufficient argument not to sign, he said.

The irony was that Australia, which did not ratify Kyoto, would
meet its targets while "a large number of European countries and
Canada" would not. He said it always struck him as "interesting"
that the Europeans and British were prepared to sign Kyoto at the
same time as the former Eastern Bloc was deindustrialising and
Britain was closing its coalmines.

"I am quite proud that we are going to meet our target, which is
a damn sight better than many countries in Europe," he said.

Mr Howard again described it as a mistake for Australia to walk
away from his Work Choices changes and again warned that this would
hurt the economy.

Asked how he had changed Australia during his 11½ years as
prime minister, Mr Howard said he had ended the "pointless debate
about our identity" and engendered "a rather positive view about
Australian history and Australian achievement".

"I think our sense of national pride is stronger now than it was
in the 1990s, less ambiguous, and that's tremendously
important."

Mr Howard pointed to the deepening of the US alliance and the
free trade agreement, revealing after the speech that he and his
family had dined with the US President, George Bush, and his family
at the White House last Thursday.

Asked what he would do on his return from his five-week speaking
tour of the US, he said: "Oh, a number of things. Enjoy
myself."